The Yage Letters William S Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg City Lights, 72pp, £9.99 ISBN 0872864480

When I arrived in the circular shaman's hut on the outskirts of Leticia, in the Colombian Amazon, I had no idea I was following in the footsteps of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Like many other curious youngsters on the gringo trail across Latin America, I had come to take a curious and mystical drug known as yage (pronounced yah-hey). Throughout my 18 months in Colombia, I had heard intriguing things about yage - its strong hallucinogenic properties, the fact that Indians used it to communicate with the divine. I was half hoping it would give me a spiritual insight, some answers from another realm. Certainly, Colombia had presented me with an alarming array of questions: how could I reconcile my life with the horrific injustices I saw there? Was such cruelty part of human nature? Why did I enjoy living in such a dark and troubled country?

I encountered many of these sentiments again on the pages of The Yage Letters, which has been re-edited and reissued by the US beat publisher City Lights. This enigmatic epistolary novel ostensibly consists of a correspondence between Burroughs and Ginsberg during their various adventures in Latin America between 1953 and 1963. In fact, much of its first chapter, "In Search of Yage", was written by Burroughs after he returned from his travels. He had left his home in Mexico City after fatally shooting his wife in 1952, and headed south, having heard rumours of a plant that had such strong psychotropic properties that it could "change fact".

The first part of the book is by turns a grim and hilarious account of his attempts to track down the elusive vine. Having stopped off in Panama to "have my piles out", Burroughs's alter ego, Willy Lee, heads for Bogotá, "a gloomy sombre-looking town", where "you feel the dead weight of Spain sombre and oppressive". After some sketchy preparations involving insect repellent and a rubber rucksack, he ends up in Putumayo, one of Colombia's most remote and jungly reg ions, where he promptly has his underpants stolen by a rent boy, gets arrested and then contracts malaria.

As Burroughs's account progresses, it becomes clear that neither the book nor his quest is really about yage. It is about his attempt to lose himself, and his discovery of a disconcerting, compulsive continent in the process. He is filled with disgust for Latin America, for its seediness, for the physiognomy of its people ("the higher you get, the uglier the citizens"), and its nasty, simmering political tensions. Everywhere he goes, he is haunted by a "horrible, sick feeling of final desolation".

On the other hand, he finds a refuge there from the buttoned-up morals of 1950s America. "South America does not force people to be deviants," he writes. "Nothing human is foreign or shocking." He distinguishes between the deathly, repressive influence of the Spanish and the magical, chaotic, life-giving force that is indigenous to the continent ("This I think is what the Colombian civil war is basically about," he remarks, astutely). Yage epitomises this mystical spirit; it is the key to a different way of being.

When he finally happens upon a crate of the stuff, however, it is a disappointment. It tastes bitter and induces a bout of violent vomiting, loss of co-ordination and "helpless misery". Not that this prevents him from further experiments, or from recommending the drug to Ginsberg, who headed out there seven years later to try it for himself. He has a somewhat more spiritual experience, "seeing or feeling what I thought was the Great Being, or some sense of It, approaching my mind like a big wet vagina".

Where Burroughs and Ginsberg blazed a trail, today's young travellers are still following: I was surprised to find a pair of teenagers, im maculately attired in white Nikes and baseball caps, awaiting their doses cross-legged on the shaman's floor. I doubt that it provides many of the answers they are looking for - my experience, much like Burroughs's, was nauseating and vaguely disappointing. Disconnected from its spiritual roots, yage has become just one more recreational drug in a crowded market.

Alice O'Keeffe is arts editor of the NS

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